All Clear

“There aren’t any tomorrow either,” she said. “But I’m afraid I have more bad news.” She told them about not knowing about the raids after the first of the year.

“But Notting Hill Gate’s safe, right?” Mike said. “And Townsend Brothers, so you two are safe during the day.”

“No,” Eileen said. “My supervisor told me today they plan to let all the Christmas help go as soon as the New Year’s sales are over.”

“And we have another problem,” Polly said. “Sometime—I don’t know when—Eileen and I are going to be conscripted.”

“Conscripted?” Mike said. “Into the Army?”

“Not necessarily, but into some sort of national service. The ATS or the land girls or working in a war-industry factory. It’s the National Service Act. All British civilians between the ages of twenty and thirty must sign up.”

“Can’t you get a deferment from Townsend Brothers or something?” Mike asked.

“No,” Polly said. “And if we don’t volunteer before it goes into effect, we run the risk of being assigned somewhere outside of London.”

“Which means we’d better find a way out of here fast,” Mike said, frowning.

“Don’t you know when any of the raids are, Polly?” Eileen asked nervously.

“Some of them,” Polly said. “And some nights the Luftwaffe attacked other cities.”

“And they can’t attack when the weather’s bad,” Mike said, “which should help for the next couple of months. And the Blitz ends in May, right?”

“Yes, May eleventh,” Polly said. But between now and then nearly twenty thousand civilians will be killed.

“So all we have to do is get through the next four and a half months,” Mike said, “and then we’re safe till Denys Atherton gets here.”

Safe, Polly thought.

“And that’s a worst-case scenario. We’re bound to figure out a way to get home before—” He stopped. “What is it, Polly? Why are you looking like that?”

“Nothing. What is that dreadful odor?”

“My coat,” Eileen confessed. “I’m afraid I used a bit too much benzene on it to get the blood out.”

“A bit?” Mike said, laughing, but the fumes grew so overpowering they had to abandon the staircase and go sleep in the station, which was no warmer.

“We must get Mike a coat,” Eileen said on the way to work the next morning. “Perhaps there’ll be one marked down that we can buy.”

But they had no time to look amid the preparations for the New Year’s sales and then the sales themselves, which people flocked to in spite of the wretched weather. The next few days there was bone-chilling fog and almost constant sleet.

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Eileen asked as they hurried to Oxford Circus after work. “It means there won’t be any raids.”

It also meant that getting Mike a coat was more urgent than ever and that the benzene was increasingly overpowering when Eileen’s coat got wet. “Miss Snelgrove said the odor would fade,” Eileen said, “but it doesn’t seem to, does it?”

“No,” Polly said. It was a good thing there was a ban on smoking in the shelters. A stray flicked match and they’d both go up in flames.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said about our having to volunteer,” Eileen said as they got on the train. “Perhaps I could volunteer to be an ambulance driver at St. Bart’s. When I took the ambulance back, Dr. Cross said if I hadn’t got those passengers to hospital when I did, they’d have died.”

“What passengers?”

Eileen told her about the unconscious ambulance driver and the Army lieutenant. Thank goodness Mike isn’t here to hear this, Polly thought. The last thing he needed was to begin worrying all over again about the possibility of their having altered the course of the war.

We couldn’t have, she told herself. We won the war. And the twenty-ninth went just like it was supposed to. But after Mike and Eileen were asleep, she stole away to look at a discarded newspaper and make certain.

The Guildhall had burned just as it had in the historical records, and so had St. Bride’s and St. Mary-le-Bow. But All Hallows by the Tower had burned, too. She’d thought it had been only partially destroyed. And the Evening Standard said the Germans had dropped fifteen thousand incendiaries instead of eleven thousand.

But those could easily be errors in reporting, she thought, crawling back under Eileen’s reeking coat. We won the war. Eileen and I were both there on VE-Day.

But the discrepancies haunted her all the next day, and on her lunch break she bought the Herald and the Daily Mail to check and then went up to the book department to tell Eileen not to say anything to Mike about her possibly driving an ambulance for St. Bart’s. “Or about what Dr. Cross said. He’d think driving an ambulance was too dangerous.”

“That’s true,” Eileen said absently, much more concerned with getting Mike a coat.